rock Boeser is 20 years old and has played nine professional hockey games.

In a developmental utopia, he’d start next season enduring relative hardships in the minors. There, he’d bake, spending months — if not a year or two — practising relentlessly as a pupil in the school of “hey kid, you’re gonna learn to play the right way.”

Well, good luck with that.

“If he’s not ready (for the NHL), I don’t know who is,” said Craig Button, TSN’s prince of prospects.

“He had the wrist injury for much of last year and he was still a really good player.

“On a national championship(-calibre) team, he was one of the best players in the entire NCAA. He’s real. He’s a real player.

“If he’s not playing in the NHL next year, one of two things have happened.

“He’s either fallen off the map or the Canucks have got incredibly better with a lot of better players and they’ve done it really quickly.”

What are the chances either of those things are happening in the next four months?

Yeah, not great.

Nine games, four goals

Boeser’s arrival may have been immoderately hyped but his on-ice performance was kind of lost at the end of the season, when the Canucks looked as helpless as overdone potatoes put in a stock during a full-on roaring boil.

Thing is, Boeser was really good. In nine games, the six-foot, 190-pounder led the Canucks in goals (four), points (five) and was second in shots (25).

Yes, he is their best prospect.

He had a positive impact on linemates Bo Horvat and Sven Baertschi, a duo who controlled an impressive percentage of shot attempts (north of 55 per cent) when playing with Boeser at even strength. In those nine games, when the score was close, the Canucks had 54 per cent of the shot attempts when Boeser was playing.

Small sample, of course, but exceedingly encouraging, too.

Boeser was accurate with that shot of his, missing the net just three times among his 28 shot attempts. Horvat, by comparison, led the team in Boeser’s nine games with 26 shots but missed the net 12 times.

The Canucks don’t think it was a fluke.

“(Boeser’s) biggest strength is his patience with the puck,” Vancouver GM Jim Benning said. “He’s able to hang on to the pucks for a long time to make a good play.

“He finds areas where he can get to and then can shoot it.”

In nine late-season games with the Canucks, six-foot, 190-pound Brock Boeser led the team in goals (four), points (five) and was second in shots (25).

Brock Boeser, who starred at the University of North Dakota, was as much a local hero off the ice as on. In the spring of 2016, he escorted super fan Baylee Bjorge to her prom. Bjorge, who was born with Down syndrome, reached out to Boeser through Instagram. The two have stayed in touch since then.

There may be some reluctance from Vancouver’s management to push Boeser this fall, because the Canucks think that in hindsight they rushed both Jared McCann and Jake Virtanen.

But this is what one scout said: “The comparison isn’t even close. Not by a mile. Boeser is so much further ahead then where those two were at.”

And a couple years older, too.

The environment surrounding Boeser’s late-season arrival wasn’t the most fecund. On a struggling team checking out on the season, it wasn’t an obvious spot where the Canucks were setting their top prospect up to succeed.

It could have gone sideways for him. It didn’t. Not even close.

Think about it this way — Boeser thrived while being parachuted into an imploding team, for a lame-duck coach, without time to practise the power play, and with a wrist issue that required some rest and rehab at the end of the season.

Oh, and the Canucks don’t think he was quite in NHL shape.

“The reason why we brought him up was we wanted to get him acclimatized to the NHL,” Benning said. “We wanted to get him a taste of the NHL. He still, off the ice, has some work to do this summer to get into the type of shape he’s going to need to be in to last an 82-game season.

“It’s different when you come from college and it’s a 45-game schedule. It was a good experience for him, beside his production.

“He got a good idea of the speed and strength of the players. Now, he knows this summer what he needs to do to have a good training camp and give himself a chance to make the team.”

Winger Brock Boeser (third from left) is the centre of attention after scoring his first career NHL goal against the host Minnesota Wild on March 25. Boeser went on to score four goals in his nine NHL games to end the season.

Benning said the decision on where Boeser starts next season will be determined in training camp.

“The one thing about these good young players we have is that when they’re ready to play in the NHL, we’re going to make room for them,” Benning said. “But we don’t want to put them in a situation where they’re going to lose confidence or they’re not going to keep developing.

“We’ve talked to him. He knows what it’s going to take and I’m confident he’s going to do the work off the ice.”

BROCK BOESER

Age: 20.

Canucks Prospects Ranking: 1.

Last season: Boeser overcame wrist surgery to put up 16 goals in 32 games with the University of North Dakota. He carried that pace into the NHL and had four goals in nine games with the Canucks to end the season.

The skinny: Boeser has been a scoring machine in college and he has skills that are translatable in the NHL, including a really accurate shot which we saw in Vancouver in April. The only real question for Boeser is when he’s going to arrive for good with the Canucks. Some think the Canucks want to wait half a season, to give him some seasoning in Utica. If he scores at all in the pre-season, however, that plan would likely be turfed to start the Boeser era.